And I was honestly asking what his or her native language is. I know for a fact that there are A LOT of non-native english speakers here. There's also A LOT of people who post when drunk/high/on meds/etc._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.https://www.facebook.com/O.A.Drake/https://twitter.com/oadrake

It's not a big deal to have English as a second language. I've also been assuming Arioch isn't a native speaker because his/her posts are often syntactically or grammatically unique. I don't have any trouble understanding him/her, though, so I haven't bothered to ask.

It's also true we have a lot of people with English as a second language here... but with only one or two exceptions you'd never know from their posts. Their English is as good as my English. My Dutch, sadly, is far less passable._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. Iíll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

It's not a big deal to have English as a second language. I've also been assuming Arioch isn't a native speaker because his/her posts are often syntactically or grammatically unique. I don't have any trouble understanding him/her, though, so I haven't bothered to ask.

It's also true we have a lot of people with English as a second language here... but with only one or two exceptions you'd never know from their posts. Their English is as good as my English. My Dutch, sadly, is far less passable.

I think you don't give yourself enough credit. The differences in the word choices you use compared to those you might wish to use, or that a native speaker would use, aren't that great. Nothing you've posted so far has been unintelligible.

Being American, I don't speak any other languages, and I think that's a shame. I understand, though, that idioms are difficult to learn and use proficiently. So, if I have any feeling about your English ability, it's one of being impressed._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. Iíll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

Eh I've read worse syntax Arioch, so you can relax. You make sense, it's just us grammar nazis that get twitchy. But you can feel free to ignore us. Hell even if I call myself a 'grammar nazi' my sense of punctuation is thoroughly hideous so there you go XD

To tell you truth, i tend to think that punctuation in English is next to non-existing.

Not that i am good in Russian punctuation, but i constantly find an urge to put a comma or too according to Russian rules, to express the phrase structure visually.

Well, the only things i know of English punctuation are that words are cut with double-dash and that paragraphs do not have special 1st line margin. In school we definitely learned all those Tenses and Irregular Verbs and such, but punctuation ? Recall nothing here

Oh, there was a proposition to assemble National-Linguists Party, but they failed to get the numbers.
Intersection of two harsh criteria was minuscule

;-D

But on a serious note i think it is consistent with overall English trend to simplificate the words and fix the patterns of phrase constructing instead.

With Old English and even more in Russian - and probably all synthetic languages - words order mean very little and different classes of words (like verbs vs nouns) are usually obviously different, then sometimes without hinting at phrase structure it get rather ambiguous. In analytical languages like modern English if you laid the phrase "by rules" then the punctuation (or intonations orally) does not convey much extra info.

So the difference for linguistic jokes.
English jokes tend to puzzle listener by stream where any phrase pattern might be randomly applied, like "Buffalo buffalo buffalo..."
Russian language jokes frequently take, for example, nouns but put they into form and position when they started to look and act like they were verbs.

Frankly, i see nothing comical in Buffalo, to me it is looks just like some mathematics puzzle. But if the internals patterns on English were "in my blood" from early days, then i'd probably laugh at them. Similarly i laugh at russian jokes, but you'd probably miss them completely.

And, canceling offtopic, which is great about Tat if that most of his strips are funny without regard to language used

Thanks, though i must admit when in haste i fail to reformulate my thoughts according to English phrase schemes, worse - i keep forgetting idioms.

For example in aforementioned folklore post i used "Little helping" in literal sense, while in English "of little help" is soft way to say "no help at all"

So in the end i'm a bit surprised you manage to understand me

For reference, your English skills are WAY better than my Russian skills, which are basically non-exsistant. Also, the "rules" of English are pretty much a cluster fuck, so I can't fault non-native speakers._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.https://www.facebook.com/O.A.Drake/https://twitter.com/oadrake